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Latinx Feminist Aesthetics & Social Categories

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Latinx Feminist Aesthetics & Social Categories

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Latinx feminist aesthetics challenge traditional social categories by emphasizing the intersections of race, gender, and class. Fostering a more inclusive understanding of identity within the Latinx community

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Dissonance, and how it's used to empower ones identity through popular music.

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Pushing the mainstream ideals of sexuality, race and feminism to highlight the identities of an individual, pushing back against conventional norms.

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"the wave" is a significant term in latinx culture as it means "vibe"

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It can signify resisting dominant narratives or expectations tied to latinidad and its representation

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Intersectionality examines how identities like race, gender, and class shape oppression or privilege. In Dissonant Divas, Deborah Vargas shows how Latinx women in music resist mainstream ideals, using dissonance to challenge norms and highlight intersectional identities.

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Artists and thinkers within this realm discuss the importance of embracing one’s identity as a source of strength and resilience, promoting a sense of belonging and community among marginalized groups

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Empowerment involves reclaiming identity against societal norms. In Dissonant Divas, Deborah Vargas shows how Latinx artists use music and dissonance to challenge expectations, reclaim narratives, and empower their communities.

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In "Toward a Decolonial Feminism", Lugones emphasizes liberation as the process of dismantling colonial and patriarchal systems that oppress women of color. She discusses how liberation requires a rethinking of imposed gender roles and decolonizing practices that have historically marginalized communities.

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decolonial feminism expands intersectionality by addressing colonialism's role in shaping identities and oppressions, critiquing mainstream frameworks for neglecting its impact on women of color.

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Methods like "papo-de-mana" (sista talk) empower Black trans communities by sharing experiences and centering their struggles. Groups like "Trans Revolução" foster collective care, resistance, and agency against systemic violence.

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challenges and disrupts the certainty of rigid categories of knowledge. It argues that such an approach risks being forgetful or dismissive at best, and oppressive at worst, by ignoring the complex, transformative nature of latinidad.

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The author’s focus on trans feminism and "vivências insubordinadas" (unsubordinated living) advocates liberation from oppressive gender and racial systems, reimagining Black trans lives beyond violence toward transformative change.

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Selena - Disco Medley (Official Live From Astrodome)

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Dora Silva Santana |Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California at Berkeley

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Dora Silva Santana |Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California at Berkeley

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“To listen in detail calls into primary question the ways that music and musical reflect - inflashes, moments, and sounds- the colonial, racial, and geographic past and present…”(Vazquez, 2013,4).

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“music does not just passively reflect society; it also serves as a public forum within which various models of gender organization (along with many other aspects of social life) are asserted, adopted, contested, and negotiated.”(Cepeda, 2010,11)

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“ Selena reimagine the borderlands through their formation of divascapes, travel, and the cultivation of north-to-south and south-to-south flows of music. These Chicana singers enable a sonic imaginary of the borderlands according to new musical mappings of both Tejana subjectivity and Chicano music.”(Vargas, 2012, 20).

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Olga Guillot’s performance of “Bravo” is a masterclass empowerment and self-respect. The song conveys the strength of a person who has faced heartbreak but refuses to be defeated. Guillot's powerful vocals and emotive delivery embody the resilience of someone who recognizes their worth and chooses dignity over despair. The repeated declaration of "Bravo" celebrates personal courage and the resolve to move forward, making the performance a profound anthem of empowerment.

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 Tropics of desire interventions from queer Latino

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 Tropics of desire interventions from queer Latino

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Quiroga discusses how the nightclub becomes a stage for the collective experience of melancholia—a reflection of the hardships faced by queer Latinx individuals, including homophobia, racism, and exile. This melancholia is often counterbalanced by the resilience and creativity displayed in these spaces.

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Liberation Through Hybrid Identities:
Cepeda explores how Colombian musicians blend traditional sounds with global influences, creating hybrid genres that defy categorization. This act of blending signifies liberation from rigid definitions of nationality, race, and ethnicity. Songs become repositories of collective memory and resistance, embodying the struggles and aspirations of marginalized communities. Through music, historical injustices are acknowledged and reimagined as sites of possibility and change.

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Vargas’s performance of "Paloma Negra" conveys raw emotional vulnerability, a quality often dismissed as weakness in patriarchal frameworks. However, Vargas reclaims this vulnerability as a source of strength, embodying the resilience needed to confront pain and loss.

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As a queer woman performing a genre historically dominated by hypermasculine figures, Vargas’s interpretation of "Paloma Negra" challenges traditional ideas of femininity and masculinity. Her androgynous appearance and emotive singing style defy societal expectations of how women should present themselves.

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Racism/Sexism in literature and videography

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Racism/Sexism in literature and videography

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The video "Chiquita banana and the cannibals" includes a character tied to the United Fruit Company, as emblematic of exoticized Latinx femininity. This character serves as a caricature of Latin American culture, reducing it to a playful, sexualized, and consumable commodity for U.S. audiences.

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The Chiquita Banana imagery also reflects anti-Blackness within Latin American societies themselves, where Afro-descendant populations were and are often marginalized. By erasing Afro-Latinx presence and contributions in favor of a sanitized, mestizo-tropical image, the video contributes to the invisibilization of African heritage in Latinx culture, perpetuating systemic racism.

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Victoria Santa Cruz’s "Me Gritaron Negra" 

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Victoria Santa Cruz’s "Me Gritaron Negra" 

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The central theme of the poem and performance is the racial discrimination Santa Cruz faced as a Black woman. The moment she recalls being called "negra" as an insult reflects the internalized anti-Blackness within Latinx communities. Her eventual reclaiming of "negra" as a term of empowerment critiques the societal structures that devalue Afro-Latinx identities.

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Advait Jagannathan

Aidan De La Cruz

Jayleen Manjarrez